The crying continues, a hiccupping sob, but above it I hear Karissa's calm voice call out. "In here."
The den.
I walk that way, pausing in the doorway. Karissa is sitting on the couch, her arm around Melody as the girl cries on her shoulder. My apprehension lessens just a bit with the swell of relief, but it doesn't completely fade away.
"What happened?" I ask, glancing between them uneasily. I hate crying, no matter who's doing it.
"It's Paul," Karissa says carefully, shooting her friend a sympathetic look when the name makes her cry harder.
"Ah." Paul. "Something happen to him?"
"Yes," she says, hesitating before sighing. "Well, we don't know. He sort of just… disappeared."
That he did.
Poof.
Gone.
Carried away by the wind.
"Disappeared," I repeat.
"Yeah," she says. "Nobody's seen or heard from him in days. The police say there's no sign of foul play, but his car was left at his work and his phone was all smashed up in the alley, so I don't know how they can say that. Clearly he didn't run away."
"He wouldn't," Melody chimes in, sniffling as she tries to control her sobs. "He wouldn't just run away. He had work… and school… he had me. Something happened to him, somebody did something to him. God! Why would somebody want to hurt him?"
Why? The million-dollar question.
I could answer it, but it wouldn't be what she wanted to hear.
Melody starts crying again. I take it as my cue to excuse myself. I pull the discs from my coat pocket and walk over to my desk, sitting down across the room, giving the two of them their space.
I pop the first disc in the drive and wait for it to load. Six cameras are positioned around the outside of Cobalt, two in the front and two in the back, with two more along the alley, giving a complete view of the building and the streets around it. The screen is split into squares, the feed from all angles playing simultaneously. I'm not exactly sure what I'm looking for, or if it'll even help, but I know Carmela. She wouldn't have just attacked me that night on a whim. She would've scoped the building out, put a plan in place and gone over it again and again.
Desperation doesn't completely erase a built-in knack for survival, which she clearly has.
I watch the feeds for a while, fast forwarding through hours of nothingness, watching the comings and goings around Cobalt, and waiting for something to spark my interest. I breeze through two days of footage as Karissa and Melody talk amongst themselves across the room. The crying grates on my nerves as I drum my fingers on the arm of my chair, growing more and more on edge.
I want silence, and peace.
I want this over and done with.
I need to put an end to it.
Move on with my life.
I'm on day three of the footage already when Melody finally pulls herself together and climbs to her feet. "I should go. It's getting late."
It is.
It's nearing dusk.
She's been here for hours.
"Are you sure?" Karissa asks. "You don't have to go. You can stay as long as you want. We have guest rooms."
My eyes dart over top of the laptop screen, meeting Karissa's right away. She shoots me a 'no nonsense' kind of look that silences me before I even say anything. She'll fight me on it. She will. And it'll get ugly if I interfere.
"I'm sure," Melody says, hugging Karissa. "Thanks for being there for me today. Sorry you missed your classes because of this."
"Not a problem," Karissa says right away. "Anything you need, you just let me know. I'm here."
"I'll remember that." Melody gives her a watery smile before turning to me. "Thanks for letting me cry on your couch, Ignazio."
"Thank Karissa for that," I say. "She extended the invitation, not me."
Karissa groans. "What he means to say is 'you're welcome' and 'come over anytime'."
Karissa walks her friend out as my gaze settles back on the laptop, the afternoon streaming away on the screen. After Melody is gone, Karissa strolls back in, pausing in the doorway. I can sense her gaze burning through me.
"You skipped school," I say without looking up, "on the first day."
"She needed me."
"For what? It's not as if you could do anything."
She says nothing.
I can still feel her gaze.
Glancing up, I meet her eyes. She's staring at me hard.
"Could you?" she asks. "Could you do something?"
"Like what?"
"I don't know… whatever it is you do. Dealing with people and finding things are your specialties, right? That's what you told me. So you can find people, too, right? I mean, you found me."
"Actually, you found me," I say, hitting pause on the feeds to look at her. "You stumbled right into my path."
"But you would've found me, eventually," she says. "You were looking for my mother… maybe you still are looking for my mother. I don't know."
She pauses, staring at me. She formed it as a statement, but I see the questions in her eyes. I'm not going to answer, though, and I don't think she expects me to, because she moves on quickly.
"I'm just saying, you do things… those kinds of things… so I thought maybe you could find him. For Melody. For me."
"For you."
"Yes," she says. "As a favor."
I lean back in my chair, eyeing her warily. She's opening a door I'm not sure she's ready to walk through. "Tell me something, Karissa."
She hesitates at my serious tone. "What?"
"When you poisoned my food, where did you get the drugs from?"
Her cheeks grow red, a hint of alarm in her eyes as she averts her gaze. "I didn't poison your food. I didn't want to hurt you."
"You're avoiding the question."
"It doesn't matter."
"It does," I say, "to me."
Shaking her head, she stares at the floor near my desk. "What does this have to do with anything? I'm sorry, okay? Is that what you want to hear? I'm sorry I drugged your food. I'm sorry I ran off in the middle of the night. I'm sorry I led you to my parents. I'm sorry I got my father killed."
"I thought you didn't have a father."
"I don't." Her voice has a hard edge to it. "I'm just saying…"
"You're saying you're sorry," I chime in when she doesn't finish. "But what you're not saying… what you're avoiding saying… is that Paul gave you the drugs that sparked all of it."